Humbly I present to you, our bundle of readers, this week’s Humble Weekly Bundle. It concerns seven games from venerable Brit publisher Codemasters, which are on average Quite Good. Racing! Man-shooting! Very sweary man-shooting! Imp-herding! An ARPG I’ve never played! More racing! More imp-herding!

A minimum pledge of $1 gets you these:

Overlord < << Imp-herding
Overlord Raising Hell (Expansion Pack) <<
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising <<< Man-shooting, not very good
Operation Flashpoint: Red River <<< This the very sweary one, a bit better but still not very good
Rise of the Argonauts <<< This is the ARPG I haven't played

Depending on how you choose to split your payment, a decent chunk of your cash can go to charity Special Effect, whose sterling work is explained below. Or some/all can go to Codies themselves or the organisers at Humble. Look, I really shouldn’t have to explain this system after all these years.

Here are some trailers, for fear any of my colleagues tell me this post is too short.

IndieGala’s bundle was so similar that when I got an e-mail from Humble saying that my Codemasters bundle now had DiRT, I went to IndieGala to check.
In my opinion, I prefer the IndieGala one. It didn’t have DiRT or Argonauts, but it had FUEL (and some other things).

my neighbor’s mom makes $66 an hour on the internet. She has been without work for 5 months but last month her income was $16989 just working on the internet for a few hours. Read more on this site ..,.,..,.,.,., jobs80
(Go to site and open “Home” for details)

Yer what a joke I bought that bundle from indie a few weeks back not only was it a better bundle it was also cheaper, don’t know what code masters and humble are doing here but I feel slightly less charitable towards both of them so neither humble nor code masters will get any tips for a while
Comes across to me like code masters are treating this like flash sales and humble letting them do it leaves a bad taste in my mouth

Speaking of bad taste why isn’t this in the bargain bucket? Makes rps look but hurt and pathetic comes across as middle finger for Lewie

Yes how silly of me I have two steam accounts one with180games the other with 314 games
The smaller account is doubles from all the bundles and you claim people like me will one day make bundles obsolete lolol
Don’t give your day jobs up

You’re not being compelled to spend tiny amounts of money on games, so it’s okay if they appear in two different places, really– and it’s not as if those places share exactly the same audience, either– and nor is anybody forcing you to attach them to your Steam account.

I don’t disagree with you, but as a consumer supporting charity bundles, the expectation is that code masters in this instance, doesn’t appear to me as if it is using a charity to increase sells/profit, every bundle I’ve ever bought I have always given an equal split between the devs, charity, hoster
Look around code masters games are on sale everywhere
Now I’m thinking they are flash selling all there games and hiding behind charitable cause sand with that in mind humble and code masters won’t be getting any tips, I’ll dedicate it all to charity
People might think that’s harsh but I smell exploitation and I for one won’t support it

Consumers like to buy games through different mediums. I don’t see why it should matter if Codemasters is putting its games up for cheap on multiple platforms. In fact many games in Humble Bundles are often on sale on steam at the same time the bundle goes up (RO2 comes to mind).

humble bundle sales have always been mutually beneficial to all parties involved, including the consumer. If CM was having a sale, i see nothing wrong with also throwing the deal into a humble bundle. No one really loses and no one is taken advantage of.

i was never under the impression that humble bundle sales were all about altruism. What a dev “loses” in money it gains in exposure.

Humble Bundle support are so nice. I wasnt paying attention and I accidentally bought the latest audiobook bundle instead of the Codies one, so I asked for a refund and they gave me it! (I did also bought the Codemasters bundle).

I remember almost peeing my pants in anticipation of Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising coming out. That infantry / tank teaser that looked so awesome (link to youtube.com). The massive play area. The anally modeled weapon porn (link to youtube.com).

I have played it a few times, and it always seems to promise more than it can muster. Maybe I am just impossibad at it … but yeah. I just seemed to die an awful lot and my AI squad seemed to all want to welcome the nice friendly bullets into their faces. It always left me with the feeling that it had more, if only I could figure out how to make it give me the fun. I never did. Sad times.

Aahhhh I just tried playing it and now I have a headache. The AI seems to do whatever it feels like. I do remember downloading a guide which explained the completely non-intuitive way of actually getting your squad to behave, but just going in blind and following prompts will likely leave a person confused. Again, there’s that sense of “I’m sure it could be awesome, what am I doin wrong?” :)

There was a whole ton loads of broken promises and out right lies about how this game would play in its pre-release hype run.

In the pre-release vids they talked about a large open world with the freedom to go anywhere and choose your own targets in a constantly evolving battlefield that covered the entiure island. So a dynamic campaign that ebbed and flowed with your success on the battlefield where you set out and set your own mission parameters on the fly. I suppose a bit like the Evo mod for Arma1. Anyway that was how they were selling it in the run up to release.

The reality was a series of very linear scripted missions with a boxed in mission area. There was essentially very little room to be creative about how you tackled the missions. Huge disappointment, never bought a Codies game since and probably won’t. Oh yeah and after release I think they begrudgingly gave it one patch and then washed their hands of it.

A real shame because the actual engine it all ran on looked very nice and overall it was considerably less clunky than Arma.

Codemasters have had a run on ruining good franchises in recent years. Turning Colin McRae Rally into a rad dude west coast USA racing game. How irritating were those voice overs? The worst crime was that the actual rally bit got turned into a minor foot note in the events list. And now in Dirt 3 they don’t even have cockpit cams.

Of all of those games, Operation Flashpoint: Red River was the only fun one for me. But alas, it has games for windows live in it and codemasters shows no signs of patching it out, so my copy no longer works.

Joystick has a pretty comprehensive rundown of which games have been patched or are going to be patched and which games are just going to stop working when GFWL dies (RPS, Joystick is kind of doing your job for you here!)

Can you source the “not working” claim? I know this is a fear, but I haven’t seen any evidence that it’s a known quantity. How do we know they’ll cease to function with the marketplace turned off? How do we know they aren’t being switched to Xbox Games or whatever it is on the backend?

A Microsoft employee I talked to pointed out that Microsoft has a long history of supporting software long past the point people stopped using it, and didn’t buy for a second that the plug was just going to be pulled.

The important thing, I assume particularly for the Flashpoint games, is that any GFWL multiplayer game will no longer be multiplayer.

For single player you shouldn’t even need an offline profile* – my experience with GFWL games in the past is that if my internet connection or their servers are down my profile still works, it’s just offline (no achievements, friends etc). Much like Xbox Live really.

*Or rather, you shouldn’t need to create an offline profile on a PC that already has your regular profile stored. I would assume you’ll need to create an offline profile on future installs.

Overlord was a huge disappointment. I expected to play as an horrible villain, ruthlessly murdering innocent people for their gold and never letting morality stand between me and power. Instead, I played as a jerk. Who fights other jerks. Yes, I got to kill a unicorn at one point. Except that it was an EVIL UNICORN! Why they hell couldn’t it be a beautiful, pure, chaste unicorn? Maybe you have to wait for the expansion or the sequel before you get to do evil things.

“Raising Hell” (the expansion) is a bit variable in quality, and still doesn’t involve you being actually, you know, evil.

In the sequel, however, you regularly find yourself asked to choose between annihilating the population of the town you’ve just conquered and enslaving them to dig mines for you where they used to live. Overlord 2 is very much Dungeon Keeper-style evil. Oh, and you can get your minions drunk, which is childish but hilarious.

This would require Alec to come down from his smoking / inspiration room, remove his monocle and instruct an RPS serving minion to correct the typo, so I think we can safely say that our bundle will remain “dityer” than it ideally should be.

Rise of the Argonauts is very much recommended. A crude quick description would probably be “Mass Effect in Ancient Greece” (6-choice dialogue wheel, small group of distinct heroes with their own vehicle gathering space, player chooses next area to play), except it does everything, from combat to dialogue to being an RPG, better than Mass Effect. It even has 3 different “alignments” instead of Mass Effects 2 – and unlike Paragon/Renegade, Rise of the Argonauts alignments make sense and are clearly defined.

It’s been a while so the specifics might be wrong, but I think combat is your basic light attack, block/counter, strong blockbreaker attack with a bunch of spells and special moves thrown in. Plus a very well executed weapon switch mechanic, that lets you switch weapons (I think it’s dual wield, sword and board and a slow two handed weapon) on the fly, even during combos. Different enemies and combat situations require (or reward) different weapons, so the whole thing is pretty dynamic.

I might remember it wrong but I think the 3 dialogue options also tie into the RPG skill trees and they’re focused on improving different weapon sets?

It’s a pretty neat combat system all in all – not super polished, there’s some rough spots animation and collision wise – but a lot of fun with enough depth to entertain.

Story is interesting too, with some fun interpretations of the classic tale – I remember Medea being interesting.
And the game is LONG so there’s lots to do.

I was pleasantly surprised by Rise of the Argonauts too. Not sure I’d put it in quite in the same bracket as Mass Effect/s overall, but it’s competent enough mechanically and has a very enjoyable tone. And while they do have a lot of similarities, I think it’s kinda hard on Rise to compare them as like for like. Rise is a trip to your local panto compared to Mass Effect’s West End show, but it knows it is and it’s got heart, and sometimes that’s just what you want.

I played it on 360, but unless the PC version is broken, the 59 metacritic it has seems unusually harsh – I’d say high 70s to low 80s (by usual Metacritic standards) would be a fairer reflection.

Dragon Rising wasn’t too bad in my opinion – it managed to thread the line between the massive complexity of Arma and the COD-style action games. I really enjoyed it and found the missions good and sneaky until the battles where the AI showed its utter weakness.

They went completely overboard on the “Hoo-hah USA USA!” on Red River though, and I wouldn’t touch it.

Why would they deprive themselves of giving Lewie the middle finger at every opportunity?
Just add vindictive behavior too the list of qualities this site increasingly lacks
Your absolutely right to point out why this doesnt go into the bargain bucket,
Pathetic behaviour
Getting increasingly bored with rps I feel like they are getting stale and losing the way
Right I’m off to ign where the articles don’t stop on Friday night till Monday morning and where they haven’t turned from enthusiasts into business men working 4 day weeks

“Just add vindictive behavior too the list of qualities this site increasingly lacks”

So… you WANT sites to have vindictive behavior?

Other than that, that was a pretty good set of lyrics for a boy band song. Just imagine a little blonde kid singing slightly autotuned “Getting increasingly bored with rps / I feel like they are getting stale / and loooooooosing the waaaaaaaaay”

Yeah, I was wondering the same thing. I guess Meer actually likes Overlord’s imp-herding. Personally, I don’t, and don’t go for racing either, but I’ll get the bundle on Commenter Above’s recommendation of Jason’s quest, or whatever it’s called.

Rise of the Argonauts has an absolutely amazing battle System. The Problem however is that when it came out you could see it in everything but the characters that is was intended for the last generation (now last, last, Speak XBox (not the XBone one), Gamecube and PS2) of Consoles. HOWEVER, one of the best Battle System of its Time, that felt really physical when battling, throwing and bashing enemys about.

EDIT: i am aware that i made an akward comment when i wrote however twice.